Ballman Planets (20.5Mb)
Ballman Planets has close association with gameplay wise, and is made in tribute to the Mega-Popular Classic all-time favorite Pacman that everyone’s played and heard of. You’ll have to decide for yourselves how classic Ballman Planets is in style and gameplay! It’s certainly a very innovative derivative!
You roam the (3D) surface of spherical planets collecting (uh-um yellow) food dots and of course there are power-ups and ghosts to chase/chase you. You have to make it to the colored target to get bounced to the next planet. Each new planet is bigger than the previous one, and there are five planets at the moment. You get bounced back to the initial planet from the fifth one, so you can revisit the planets in order as long as you have lives left.
The graphics are excellent and there’s bright cheerful arcade music/super sound effects to play along to. Whether the ghosts will instil the same fear in you as those from PacMan, only time and playing the game will tell!
You get five lives per game, and your tally for food and power-ups is shown onscreen along with your current score. Unlike Pacman there isn’t any way to morph to a different part of the planet’s surface, but there are (coil-type) springs which will jump you between planets, from one planet to the next one! The planets vary in size (affecting your walking speed) and have a day/night shadow pattern as you move around. Some of the planets have luxuriant trees and vegetation. The biggest difference from PacMan apart from the 3D is that you can only see the part of the planet you are on, that is facing you, which does complicate matters!
The animations are brilliant with your Pac figure walking as the planets rotate in whatever direction you are moving. Did I mention Dizzy? The ghosts have different incarnations, again brilliantly rendered and animated; Also different characters and behaviour patterns. You get an illuminated trail while under power-up and able to chase ghosts but a power-up doesn’t last nearly long enough, unless there are some ghosts close-by!
You control your direction with the mouse, and walk using the left mouse button. Expect to need a bit of practice to get used to walking around and quickly getting where you intended to go!
Amazingly it’s been programmed from scratch in less than three weeks, with its own 3D engine, AI engine, Physics, and file system - all entirely by the game’s authors! In time the authors hope to add new planets to explore and add new features to the game! There is a high score table ingame too.
I’m listing the Game Requirements as it’s a bit higher than for many freeware games ie:-
Pentium IV minimum (about 1.4GHz+ CPU); Windows XP, Vista or 7; Graphics card with OpenGL 2.0 shader support; 512 Mb of RAM memory; 72 Mb of hard disk space; NVidia graphics card is recommended though not essential.
{As usual if you have Vista or Windows 7, install to eg C:\Games - folder NOT Program Files to avoid the need to have to right click and run as administrator! Or not being able to play it from a non-admin account in Vista/Win 7!}
The game also has an anaglyph mode - you know 3D using red/blue glasses, though anaglyph personally soon gives me a headache! So I’ll probably be playing it mostly in normal mode! Hope the anaglyph mode doesn’t give me motion sickness! In anaglyph (stereoscopic mode) it can be difficult to tell which way is ‘forwards’! You can change modes mid-game by pressing the ‘Esc’ key.
Check your screen resolution first (right click on desktop etc) if you wish to change this in-game otherwise you might get oval rather than spherical planets! You may need to close any memory-intensive programs before running the game. If you get any problems, reboot. It doesn’t seem to like playing more than one game session per computer session! This has resulted to be completely honest, in Win 7 Ultimate x32 in having to uninstall, reboot and reinstall, but as the install only takes a few moments it’s been worth it, as it is a thoroughly excellent game otherwise, so it isn't a 'deal-breaker'.
The normal 3D perspective does give a really different feel to the game though! I have to admit that to begin with, at least, I found moving around the spherical planets quite disorientating, - and with ghosts for instance sometime appearing upside down on the lower planet surface. The ghosts AI doesn’t give you much room for navigation mistakes, as they are on you very quickly if you don’t get out of the way. This does make the game difficult to play initially and the mouse is very sensitive for changing direction, which takes getting used to. After a few goes I was much better in setting my direction of movement!
The game may not have you jumping through hoops backwards, but it will sure have you (literally) running round in circles. Hope it doesn’t make you too dizzy!
By way of recommendation, if one is needed, Ballman Planets already has some worldwide popularity and repute!
Unlike PacMan itself, some levels are quite short, but if you love Pacman (and who doesn’t?!) you’ll surely like Ballman Planets. It’s an addictive and highly entertaining game, once you ‘find your feet’ on the planet surfaces!
Yoo-Hoo look out - Ghosties coming (3 or 4 at once!)
Video and Download HERE
You can also view the video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQcS4rZbILU
